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In America, where citizens are supposed to want to keep
government out of their family decision-making, there should be no random
drug testing at public schools. Yet some 19 percent of public schools engage
in some form of student drug testing, the University of Michigan's Journal
of School Health found in 2003.

President Bush proposes to spend $25 million in 2006 to fund
more random drug testing. And the internationally minded U.S. Supreme Court
thinks that drug testing in public schools is just swell.

This is wrong. Parents who suspect their children of using drugs
are free to test their kids. Hence, there is no need for schools to
intervene  any more than there is a need for schools to set the punishment
for children who disobey their parents' rules. Except that it is happening.

It started when schools began testing athletes. There was at
least the pretense of a safety argument for the tests  you don't want
stoned kids leaping for a high fly. But by the time the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled on said tests in 1995, the rationale for the tests had expanded. The
Big Bench supported testing of athletes to prevent the "increased risk of
sports-related injury," but also because athletes are role models.

Court and school officials understand that it would be a
coercive violation of privacy rights to force all public-school students to
submit to drug tests. It goes against the presumption of innocence,
unreasonable searches, the need for probable cause and other quaint notions
found in the U.S. Constitution. So those officials who want the government
to play parent have come up with a new angle  require students who engage
in extracurricular activities to agree to random drug testing. It's not
mandatory, they argue, because students don't have to join clubs. And
believe it or not, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in 2002.

The surest bet in America is: Once a bad idea is born, it only
gets bigger. Testifying before a House committee in February, Bush drug czar
John Walters argued that school "drug testing can be done effectively and
compassionately." Its purpose, he explained, "is not to punish students who
use drugs, but to prevent use in the first place, and to make sure users get
the help they need to stop placing themselves and their friends at risk."

Problem is: It is not clear how many students don't use drugs
because they want to be in the chess club. Probably some students refrain.
Still, University of Michigan researcher Lloyd Johnston noted in 2003 that
there is "a serious question of whether drug testing is a wise investment,"
as it is not clear that it deters student drug use.

I don't think it is good policy to treat innocent students as if
they might be guilty by making them pee in a cup if they want to be in
debate club.

Meanwhile, there can be little doubt that students who use drugs
say no to extracurricular activities because they don't want to say no to
drugs. Testing for club membership, said Tom Angell of Students for Sensible
Drug Policy, pushes these students "away from those positive atmospheres
that study after study has shown are successful at keeping students away
from drugs."

It's twisted: The very do-gooders who first lament that drug use
consigns students to do poorly in school now push for policies that
marginalize students and guarantee that they will not have a full
high-school experience.

And it doesn't matter what parents think. When the Supreme Court
ruled in favor of testing for students who sign up for extracurricular
activities in 2002, I asked the National School Board Association what it
thought of a policy that required testing of students, even if parents
negotiated. "The answer is that your child cannot participate in
extracurricular activities," an official answered. "It's not negotiable."

Lori Earls, the parent of an Oklahoma high-school student on the
losing side of the 2002 case, was outraged by the school's drug policy. She
believed that other parents supported drug testing because it relieved them
of the responsibility of their children's drug use and ceded it to the
schools. "They took away the parents' job," she noted.

And yet there is no outcry.

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